Page 48 - The $100 Startup_ Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love

A spa takes away stress while making guests feel loved and accepted. A

popular message is, “We’ll do everything for you—relax and leave the details to
us.” This is also the message that a good restaurant sends, not, “Come back into
the kitchen and make your own dinner.”

Brooke Snow, an artist and musician, struggled to make a living by teaching
classes in her small Utah town. She got by without working a real job and paid
for college without going into debt, which could be considered a success on its
own, but making ends meet was a continual battle. One day she realized the
obvious: Instead of putting up flyers in Logan, Utah, and hoping for enough
phone calls, what if she could teach anywhere in the world?

The change happened by accident, ironically after one of the worst days of her
initial business. “I had to cancel a class due to underenrollment,” Brooke says.
“At the time my husband was starting graduate school, and we had an eight-
month-old baby and a new home.” Needless to say, the pressure was mounting.
When she phoned Micah, one of the few students who had enrolled, to notify
him of the cancellation, it turned out he was a doctoral candidate in instructional
technology with an emphasis on distance education.

Brooke describes herself as a good photographer and teacher but not highly
technical. Happily, she is also good at bartering—and in this case, she offered
private lessons to Micah in exchange for his help in setting up an online course.
Since it was almost perfectly in line with what he was studying, Micah was
thrilled to help Brooke make the online transition.

In the last year Brooke taught all her classes locally, she made $30,000. In the
first year she offered the class online, she made more than $60,000. Nice! Going
from offline to online helped a lot, but Brooke also attributes the successful
transition to something else: the idea of always being willing to share. Early in
her career, she went to a seminar where she heard someone say, “If you make
your business about helping others, you’ll always have plenty of work.” Here’s
what happened next:

That statement changed my life. I was in an over-saturated market of